Tomorrow, Wednesday, March 15th, we plan to reopen both Alpine and Palisades. We appreciate your patience with us being closed today: Our teams NEEDED this day to try to get ahead a bit, and snow conditions are not conducive to a good day of skiing — It rained as far up as 9,000 feet at times. We spent the day continuing to dig out, performing snow safety, addressing flood zones, and preparing for the few days ahead that have a break in the weather. Tomorrow, we still expect that some of our lifts will be delayed. We will start with a lower mountain offering and expand throughout the day as we can.
Photo above: Nick McMahon, Palisades Grooming
Lift + Terrain Openings: What To Expect Wednesday
- Palisades will start with the lower mountain only: Resort Chair, Far East, First Ventures, Red Dog, Exhibition, and KT-22. KT-22 is likely to be more delayed than the other chairs. If we can, we will then add the Funitel with Mountain Run access to start followed by the Aerial Tram, Big Blue, Bailey’s Beach, Mountain Meadow, Gold Coast, and Shirley.
- We have not been to the top of Headwall or Siberia in several days. Those lifts as well as Granite Chief, Broken Arrow, Solitude, Belmont, and Emigrant are not expected to open tomorrow. Silverado is in a league of its own; we do not have an ETA yet.
- Alpine will start with Subway, Meadow, Treeline Cirque to the mid-station, Sherwood, and Roundhouse. From there, we will continue to expand terrain as we are able.
- Groomed terrain will be limited. Our grooming crews at both mountains are focused on getting us un-buried, so only main arteries will be maintained.
- The Base to Base Gondola will run on the Palisades side only, from the Village base area up to the KT-22 mid-station.
- Tiegel Terrain Park at Alpine will begin getting rebuilt tomorrow night. We hope to have Belmont Terrain Park re-opened by the weekend.
Weather Outlook
The end is near… kind of. By tomorrow morning, (Wednesday) we could see storm totals of:
- 1-4 inches at the base.
- 4-18 inches at mid-mountain elevations.
- 16-22 inches on the upper mountain above 8,000 feet.
Nice weather is expected for Wednesday and Thursday. We will see partly sunny skies and light winds with highs in the 30s and 40s. Starting Friday, snow showers pick back up again in anticipation of a bigger cycle moving in next week. We do expect that we should be open as normal through the weekend since winds don’t seem to be an issue as of right now.
Behind The Scenes
HIGH CAMP
While we’ve been seeing almost nothing but rain in the base areas, snow has been falling on our peaks, and it is piling up faster than we can remove it. Take a look at High Camp early this morning. The roof of this building is around 12 feet off the ground in this photo. Our snowcat operators could practically drive on top of it if they wanted to! Photos: Hunter Lamer, Palisades Grooming
EMIGRANT
Meanwhile, we have QUITE the snowdrift up at the top of Emigrant. In one area last night, the Palisades Grooming Assistant Manager logged a drift of 632 inches – That’s nearly 53 feet of snow! Piles like this are typically created by wind conditions causing snow to build up in a single area.
Needless to say, we are going to have our work cut out for us on the upper mountain or high-elevation chairlifts at both Palisades and Alpine. See below for a photo of how buried the Emigrant chairlift is, as well as the ice that has built up on some of our bamboo and signage on the upper mountain.
Photos: Asa Moore, Assistant Manager, Palisades Grooming
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